Event-driven funds were the best performers globally with a gain of 3.54% in January. This is the strategy’s best performing month in the history of the HedgeFund Intelligence database, which began collecting data in 1998.

Sovereign debt is thought to be safe because, as we all know, nations always pay their debts. While individual nations go bankrupt from time to time, we maintain our faith in sovereign debt because the majority of nations don’t. But what happens if several nations go bankrupt in a very short span of time?

Some would-be critics of the US’s recent assassination of alleged terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki might be mollified by the government’s “just-trust-us” assertion that it has fingerprint evidence linking al-Awlaki to acts of terrorism. This article should give pause to any such persons.

this isn’t a “normal” trading market; it isn’t responding to the “big news” events in a common-sense way (much beloved by omnipresent j-school financial writers), if at all. It is only responding to what is happening with liquidity. And that is clearly draining out. Will we get the same Fed reaction (QE) we got in 2008? Most likely.

Medicare cuts (or lack thereof), government-sourced personal income, emergency loans to the states, and more. Russ discusses how it is hard to see how we’ll get by without some of this being renewed — and none of it is factored into the deficit projections.